THE MAKING OF THE COLONIES.

 THE BLACK PERIL.

A LEGACY FROM SPAIN.

By WANDERER.

The early colonies of England, if not actually founded by conquest, were so surrounded by scenes of sanguinary conflict that warfare may be said to have been their normal condition. During the latter half of the sixteenth century England was scarcely ever at peace; out of the seventeenth century she spent thirty-five years in fighting her enemies, and out of the eighteenth century forty-eight. A principal cause of most of these wars was the impulse of colonial enterprise, the determination of Englishmen not to be confined to their own kingdom whilst other nations were carrying their flag and spreading their commerce all over the world. In all of them the colonies played an active and heroic part as assailants or defenders, or both at once or in turn. Nothing is more interesting at the present day than to look back to those old times, and see how the colonies, neglected and often ill-treated as they were by the home Government, warmly and eagerly entered into the quarrels of the mother country, and fought her battles for her at their own cost, utterly regardless, and generally quite ignorant, of the immediate subject of hostilities. Their maxim seems always to have been:—"Our country—may she ever be in the right; but, right or wrong, our country!" Like the Six Hundred at Balaclava—

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die!

 

Every emigrant fully understood and fully intended that he was to be a soldier, or a sailor, or a pirate, or anything else that might be necessary to uphold his country's honour, and make her foes stand in awe of her; and, as the individual colonists so their governments, when they came to have such an institution. A colonial governor in those days was necessarily and by choice a military and naval commander, who, no matter what the civil constitution might be, took matters into his own hands and rallied the whole population to the colours the moment a question of war arose. "Died from natural causes" would have been quite a proper verdict on a colonial governor who was killed in action or drowned at sea. As for fighting the Spaniards, the colonists regarded it not only as a duty, but as a privilege and a pleasure; and later, when the Spaniards were crushed, and they had to fight more formidable foes—the French and the Dutch —they showed their splendid patriotism and their intrepid courage even more conspicuously. The well-known schoolboys' refrain—

One skinny Frenchman,

Two Portugee,

One jolly Englishman

Lick 'em all three.

was literally the gospel belief and the rule of conduct of all the early colonists. Every one of them was ready to lavish his whole fortune, great or small, and to lay down his life for his beloved and honoured country. Is it any wonder that they thrashed their enemies by land and sea, and planted their colonies on immovable foundations, while the conquests and settlements of other nations were melting away like a morning mist? If they had only had national enemies to deal with, their problem would have been simple enough, and their success would have been much more easily and speedily achieved. They had, however, to face a peril far more terrible than the risks of foreign aggression, and from which modern colonies are happily free.

NATIVE RACES REPLACED BY NEGRO SLAVES.

We have seen in the earlier chapters of this work how the followers of Columbus, having by their barbarous and shortsighted lust of gold destroyed the native population of their possessions in the New World, found them-selves compelled to fill their place with negro slaves, first by way of Portugal, and afterwards direct from the savage kingdoms on the West Coast of Africa. In the description of Sir Walter Raleigh's colonising expeditions in Guiana we have had a glimpse of the runaway negro slaves, called Maroons, Cimaroons, or Simaroons, whom Raleigh made friends with and turned to excellent account against the Spaniards. The origin of the word is exceedingly obscure. The most plausible derivation of it is the Spanish word Cima, a mountain top—probably the Latin summa, a summit—whence Cimmarones, those who took refuge in the mountains; and thence Simaroons and Maroons. However that may be, Maroon is the name applied to negroes who escaped from slavery and took to the woods in any of the West Indies—Spanish, French, Dutch, or English—either on the islands or on the mainland. It was more than a name —for a hundred and fifty years it was a name of terror. The word maroon for that peculiar shade of red which seems midway between crimson and black is supposed to have been taken from the complexion of these people, who were largely mixed with Indians; but it might have been taken from the blood that was shed in their conflicts with the colonists. In the whole history of human carnage there is nothing more horrible than the too well-authenticated record of the slave wars of the West Indies. The only consolation to be got from it for us is that, whereas the Spaniards, the Dutch, and the French were fairly beaten out of some of their finest possessions by the revolted negroes, we English never were; and, moreover, eventually we found a means of overcoming the danger, and even of turning it to good colonising account. It may also be said that in the first instance, at all events, the negro difficulty was none of our making. It was the Spaniards who brought the slaves there, and it was they who turned them loose upon us. Still, there is no room for self-righteousness on that score. Except that no nation can be greatly blamed for not being in advance of their age, and that there were undoubtedly dangers and perplexities that cannot be realised now, the whole story is a page in our annals which we might well wish blotted out. It was in Jamaica and Barbados that the Maroons gave the English the greatest trouble; and a wrong impression would be given of the way we made and kept those colonies without some account of the terrible struggle we had with them.

BLOOD, TORTURE, AND REVENGE.

In Jamaica, certainly, what we had to contend against was a legacy from our predecessors. When Admiral Penn and General Venables captured the island in 1655 the white population were about 1,500, owning an equal number of negro slaves. At the capitulation by the Spanish Governor the great majority of the whites went to Cuba or Hispaniola; but the lower orders, the riffraff of the towns, and the poorest class of planters refused to recognise the English supremacy, and threw in their lot with the slaves, who had deserted the plantations, and taken to the fastness of the mountains, where food abounded in the shape of wild cattle, fruits, and roots. The English in vain attempted to dislodge them, and for years there was practically no communication with them at all. There were about 500 Spanish and 1,500 negroes, and, after the defeat of the Spanish invasion in 1658, the number of whites was increased by, perhaps, 500 more, the old Spanish Governor being at their head as a sort of patriarchal chief. There were but few Spanish women among them, and the natural result was that the two races rapidly intermingled, and then became merged in the blacks. If there had been no whites with the Maroons at all the English would most likely have been able to conciliate them or come to some sort of terms with them. But the Spaniards and the half-breeds were not only implacable enemies of the English, but also exceedingly capable leaders of the negroes in bush warfare; so that within a generation from the conquest of the island the colonists found themselves threatened by an enemy from within infinitely more to be dreaded than any foreign foe. The natural increase of the Maroons was enormous, living a healthy, open-air life, as they did, in the mountains, without any drink or disease; and they were always receiving accessions from the neighbouring islands and from runaways in Jamaica. Every white bond-servant, burning with hatred against the Government, and every negro slave, driven to madness by cruelty or overwork, took the first opportunity of joining the Maroons, and, once among them, was safe from recapture and soon became one of themselves. So long as there were white men among the Maroons they constituted a terrible danger to the colony, and there can be little doubt that if they had continued to be joined by whites they would eventually have gained the mastery and driven the planters out. The stoppage of the detestable system of white slavery and the liberation of the bond-servants in Charles the Second's reign, however, combined with the total prevention of Spanish aid, left the Maroons entirely to themselves, and they rapidly became once more a black people, with no leadership and no organisation. By that time, nevertheless, they had committed such atrocities upon the planters that it was war to the knife, without any hope of mercy on either side. When the Maroons descended on a plantation in sufficient force to overcome it they habitually burnt the buildings and the sugar-canes, tortured all the white men and the faithful slaves to death, and outraged and carried off all the women and children. It was a common thing for a planter to be chained to a tree, or nailed to his own door, and slowly burnt to death, while his wife and daughters were ravished before his eyes, or his little children were outraged, mutilated, or cut in pieces and thrown to the dogs. The greatest triumph of a Maroon chief was to capture an English lady, a wealthy planter's wife or daughter, and, after slaughtering all her male belongings, to drag her back with him to the mountains and force her to become his wife. Whole families of children were similarly carried off and brought up among the Maroons, the girls being given for wives to negroes, and the boys being mated with negro girls, and the progeny of these base unions were said to be the most bloodthirsty and pitiless enemies of the whites. It is not much wonder that the planters determined, at all hazards, to be rid of the Maroons, or that they stuck at nothing in their methods of revenge. Whether they could ever have overcome them by themselves or not is doubtful. But what they did was to bring over great numbers of ferocious Indians from the Mosquito Coast, and track them to their lairs at any cost of life or money. They kept an offer standing of £5 for the ears of any Maroon, and they pursued them into the mountains with relentless vigour. In some of these conflicts battles took place, in which hundreds of whites were killed; but slowly and steadily they got the upper hand of the blacks. As for the prisoners they were burnt alive by the score, sandwiched between planks and sawn to pieces, broken on the rack, hanged up in chains in the public squares and starved to death, their torments in some cases lasting for eight or nine days. At length, the horror of the whole thing became too great for endurance, and the Government did what they ought to have done at first—organised an overwhelming expedition against the Maroons, sent artillery to destroy their towns, hunted them down with Indians and dogs, built a line of forts and blockhouses right across the interior of the island where they lived, and made existence insupportable for them. The result was that Captain Cudjo, the ablest leader the Maroons ever had, was compelled to sue for peace, and a regular treaty was signed at Trelawny Town, by which the Maroons were assured of their freedom, but entered into the service of the Government, and placed their strongholds under the command of English officials. It seemed a very simple and sensible arrangement, which, but for the Spaniards among the negroes, might have been arrived at a hundred years before. But in reality the trouble was not nearly at an end. The truth is, the difficulties and anomalies that accompany or arise out of slavery never have an end, so long as that disgrace to humanity exists at all. What happened next was this. The slaves on the plantations, as soon as they heard that the Maroons had been proclaimed free and were to be paid for any service they rendered to the Government or to white employers, demanded equal rights. The reasonableness of the demand could not be denied on any logical ground. On the one hand were the Maroons, the deserted slaves of Spanish masters or the runaway slaves of English, who had committed innumerable crimes, and cost the colony millions. On the other hand were the plantation negroes —slaves, truly, but obedient and loyal slaves, who had never revolted, never committed any crimes, never given any trouble, but, on the contrary, had created the wealth that alone had enabled the colonists to hold their own against the enemy abroad and the enemy in the interior. On what conceivable principle of justice could the bloodthirsty, torturing, hostile Maroons be made free citizens, with the right of holding slaves themselves, while the unoffending labouring class of the country were denied any political or social recognition whatsoever. Undoubtedly the politic course would have been to give them all their freedom, and to make every one of them a willing worker for the common welfare of the colony. The time was far distant, however, when West Indian planters, or even the most philosophic and statesman-like Englishman could see the light as clearly as that, and the first great opportunity for liberating the slaves on a footing of mutual profit and good faith was lost. The agitation among the plantation negroes was sternly suppressed, and immediately there began that secret connection between them and the Maroons which kept the colony, as it were, on the quaking crust of a volcano for half a century. At length in 1795, the long threatened eruption came. The immediate cause was trivial. Two Maroons had been flogged for pig-stealing— perhaps illegally—by order of the English Resident, and the whole Maroon community took up their cause, and demanded the dismissal of the Resident. The militia were called out, and preparations made for a vigorous suppression of the outbreak. Friendly negotiations followed, but these, as usual, were taken advantage of by the Maroons, who had inherited all the Spanish treachery, for strengthening then defences and completing their arrangements for war. It was then discovered that a concerted understanding existed between the Maroons and the slaves for the conquest of the island and the extermination of the English. Before any measures could be taken to prevent it a number of plantations were raided, the planters were slain or burnt alive, the women were subjected to inconceivable horrors, and the children were ruthlessly slaughtered, and in some cases eaten. The negroes had things all their own way for a time; but it did not last long. There were never in this world a tougher set of customers to deal with at a pinch than the planters of Jamaica. They called the General Assembly together, and voted money bills and any other laws that were required for their purpose. The Government then sent to Cuba for forty chasseurs, that is, trained negro hunters and a hundred bloodhounds; they levied and equipped every soldier they could raise in the island; and they sent the men, hunters, and dogs into the mountains against the Maroons. The very sight of these active preparations was enough for the slaves. They returned to the plantations and made an abject sub-mission, leaving the Maroons to bear the brunt of the rebellion alone. The Government made a clean sweep of them this time. They put great numbers to death under circumstances of revolting cruelty. They burnt their towns and destroyed their plantations; and having reduced them to utter helplessness, they deported six hundred of the leaders to Nova Scotia, and thence to Sierra Leone, on the West Coast of Africa, where they formed the nucleus of the present colony. The less formidable of the Maroons were scattered about the island and disciplined into a sort of police; and it was their descendants whom Governor Eyre employed so late as 1885, when he crushed the insurrection at St. Thomas-in-the-East, the last negro trouble in Jamaica, putting 439 persons to death, including a member of the Assembly, and flogging 600 more!

(To be Continued. Commenced July 24.)

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 23 October 1897, page 4